What is left
by CrossMikado
Summary: A movie-verse one-shot following "Prince Caspian". Susan reflects on the place her memories of Narnia should now hold in her life. Susan/Caspian


There was a line they had to cross to consider their adventures like some sort of dream, and it was thinner as days went by

AN : This is just a translation of a fic I wrote in French yesterday, after having seen « Prince Caspian ». This is a one-shot, and the first fic I write. I don't quite know what it's worth, and I'm very conscious of how confuse it is.

There was a line they had to cross to consider their adventures like some sort of dream, and it was thinner as days went by. Each of those days tore some substance from Narnia and from what Susan remembered of it. She was sitting upright against the wall, waiting for the train in this exact same spot where, months earlier, the walls had dissolved to form a heavenly beach, guarded by millennium ruins.

She surprised herself by questioning the reality of this now invisible world; as she sometimes criticized Lucy's affirmations, when the younger girl thought she saw Aslan in her dreams and tried to impose a new mission to her siblings. Aslan had asked her this, or that. "Why do you invent such things?", asked Peter, trying to display patience and conceal his exasperation. "To go back home", said Lucy, who had braided her supple brown hair as she once did in Narnia.

Susan watched her hands, then the folds of her skirt and, finally, her shoes and the cracks and notches which drew patterns on the ground. Beside her, Edmund regularly leant over, looking as usual ready to jump to his feet and positively bored. She didn't quite know if he was searching for the underground train or Peter.

No, she didn't doubt Narnia. Susan couldn't doubt it when she was defending Lucy against a classmate mocking her "childish" dreams. In those jests, her mind found sharp words with the easiness she once had had when nocking an arrow. Subsisted from this last battle against the telmarines a fierce determination, at first physical, crafted for battle. And now it had changed into wisdom and patience. She had learnt from Narnia, and when she had left she hadn't lied by saying she understood what forbid her to come back.

She had put her life at stake when she had fought for Narnia, without questioning it one moment. She had obtained so much in return. It was only natural that she should return to her own world, to turn to good account these capacities, these qualities which had been revealed to her in the heart of battle. She didn't leave Narnia with resignation, but knowing her place was no longer here. She wasn't needed, and she could take with her upon leaving her experience, her memories. It was a privilege in itself. Anyway, she was prepared to live here. She'd rather say the others were the ones having trouble to abandon the narnian marvels.

But Susan changed, contrary to them. She left her retrenchments to adapt. New encounters, newly forged friendships would replace the narnians, eternal and dead at the same time.

« Therefore, everything is in order », she thought. Why was she leading those reflections, if those were solved, defined? She was going to get on this train and she would think of something else. Subjects that related to "here", that wouldn't turn her heart over and nauseate her. She wasn't forced to forget Narnia, but, in order to keep a measure of peace, she could fake a fall into oblivion.

A castle can be forgotten, she thought. It can be reduced to an illustration in a picture book, a creation of her imagination. A creature, such as a centaur, could be brought back to being a phantasmagoria. Because it was impossible -clearly impossible- for it to exist out of her memories… But everything couldn't be resumed to a fairy tale.

A picture drew itself behind her eyes, an image that had too much of a grip on reality. Caspian's hand gripping without him even noticing the white horn at his side, his thumb grazing lightly the sculpted head of the lion. Alive, elsewhere and therefore disappeared.

By stepping back in Caspian's arms before crossing through the tree and back to London, she had lost any possibility of leaving Narnia behind for good. There was too much matter and reality in Caspian's scent, a mixture of the clean of metal and the dense Narnian woods. With it vanished the meaning of the world "reality", reduced to an absent world and an unreachable king.

When she kept her eyes closed, she could blame herself for making of Narnia a world of flesh and blood, for having permitted to a mutual attraction to transform itself into something far more complex. Indelible. Unquestionable.

And when she opened her eyes… She did so, as the train swept in the station like a whirlwind, only heavier and with noisy screeches. Edmund straightened, chin high, proud as a king back in his lands.

When she opened her eyes Susan could see one that let her leave, dark eyes and a regret, she could hear the call of a horn. She wanted to answer it and already it wasn't addressed to her anymore – as was decided for her, as was decided for them. At that moment it seemed to her that she was for Narnia an object, a tool, and her reflections went back to their start in an endless cycle – to remember, not to remember. To make of these adventures a dream, or to live them in this reality.

Not very much choice, and in spite of her various conjectures, in the end it was only about listening, searching for the sound of a horn that wouldn't come, or imagining that she could hear it, without being able to answer.


End file.
